Download and Process Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index Data • pressfreedom.data

An R package for downloading, cleaning, and standardizing press freedom data from Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières, RSF).

Overview

The Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index ranks countries by press freedom on an annual basis. This package automates the download, cleaning, and standardization of that index, providing a single clean dataset — rwb_standardized (4,192 rows, 191 countries, 20 columns) — ready for analysis. See vignette("getting-started", package = "pressfreedom.data") for the full pipeline story.

Installation

From GitHub (recommended pre-CRAN):

pak::pak("petzi53/pressfreedom.data")

# or, using the classic alternative:
remotes::install_github("petzi53/pressfreedom.data")

From source / local clone (development):

devtools::install()

From CRAN (once available):

# install.packages("pressfreedom.data")

Quick Start

Load the Dataset

library(pressfreedom.data)

# Load the standardized dataset
data(rwb_standardized)

# View first few rows
head(rwb_standardized)

Explore the Data

# Check structure
str(rwb_standardized)

# Summary by year
rwb_standardized |>
  dplyr::group_by(year_n) |>
  dplyr::summarise(
    n_countries = dplyr::n_distinct(country_en),
    avg_score = mean(score, na.rm = TRUE),
    .groups = "drop"
  )

# Track a specific country
rwb_standardized |>
  dplyr::filter(country_en == "Germany") |>
  dplyr::select(year_n, country_en, score, rank)

See vignette("getting-started", package = "pressfreedom.data") for a full walkthrough and FAQ.

Data Structure

Main Dataset: `rwb_standardized`

Key columns at a glance:

Column	Type	Description
`year_n`	integer	Year (2002–2026; 2011 missing)
`iso`	character	ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country code
`country_en`	character	Country name (English, ASCII)
`score`	numeric	Press freedom score (0–100; higher = less free)
`rank`	integer	Rank among countries this year

See ?rwb_standardized for the complete data dictionary (all 20 columns).

Data Notes

Scores are only comparable from 2013 onward (RSF changed its scoring methodology that year), and dimension columns (political/economic/legal/ social/safety) only exist from 2022 onward. See vignette("getting-started", package = "pressfreedom.data") for the full FAQ, including country consolidation and ISO code coverage.

Data Source

Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
URL: https://rsf.org/
Press Freedom Index: https://rsf.org/en/index

Data available for 24 years (2002–2026, with 2011 missing due to RSF not publishing that year).

Development

This package’s public interface is just the rwb_standardized dataset (?rwb_standardized). Data collection and update tooling (downloading, cleaning, combining, standardizing new RSF releases) are internal, maintainer-only functions – they hard-code paths that only resolve inside a development checkout and the update workflow performs a git commit, so they cannot run against an installed copy of the package. Annual updates are performed via the runbook script data-raw/update-data.R, which requires devtools::load_all(). See pressfreedom.data:::update_rwb_data etc. for advanced/development use.

After cloning, enable the versioned git hooks (blocks accidental non-ASCII characters in R source/documentation, which break R CMD check portability):

git config core.hooksPath .githooks

License

MIT License. See LICENSE file for details.

Author

Peter Baumgartner
Email: petzi53@gmail.com
ORCID: 0000-0003-4526-8791

Citation

If you use this package in research, please cite it:

citation("pressfreedom.data")

{pressfreedom} — Interactive Shiny dashboard built on this package (in development, not yet published; will be at github.com/petzi53/pressfreedom and peter-baumgartner.net/pressfreedom)
RSF Official Data: https://rsf.org/en/index

pressfreedom.data